Earth Observation and Clean Technologies

Abstract

On Sunday, April 25, 2004, the Earth Observation Summit II (EOS II) was held in Tokyo, Japan. The representatives of 43 countries from G8, Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, etc. and the European Commission got together and discussed the global environment. To begin with, the Earth Observation Summit had set up as an international round of talks to promote the development of a comprehensive, coordinated, and sustained Earth observation system or systems among governments and the international community to understand and address global environmental and economic challenges, and to begin a process to develop a conceptual framework and implementation plan for building this integrated Earth observation system. The first EOS was held in the United States in 2003, with the participants from 33 nations plus the European Commission. As its result, an ad hoc Group on Earth Observations (GEO) was established to prepare a 10-year implementation plan to co-ordinate space and ground based global monitoring systems, so-called ‘‘Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS)’’. The aim of GEOSS is to maximize the effectiveness of Earth Observation by minimizing data gaps, building capacity and exchanging information as fully and quickly as possible. Developed and developing nations alike will have access to all data gathered by the network, following the model of the World Meteorological Organization’s four-decade-old World Weather Watch, which coordinates the globe’s weather satellites along with insitu climate station. This time, at the EOS II, they adopted two documents, ‘‘Framework for a 10-Year Implementation Plan’’ and ‘‘Communique of the Earth Observation Summit II’’. In the Framework for a 10-Year Implementation Plan, they resolved: – to identify the key observation areas and objective (nine benefits such as reducing loss of life and property from natural and human induced disasters, understanding, assessing, predicting, mitigating, and adapting to climate variability and change and improving water resource management through better understanding of the water cycle), – to overcome shortcomings of current observation systems (strengthen involvement of the developing countries, improve Earth observation technology, strengthen observation systems), and – to give guidance for establishing new Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) (strengthen existing observation systems, establishing successor international mechanism).